Reddit’s worst misogynists just can’t stop attacking Katie Bouman, the 29-year-old MIT researcher who has inadvertently become their newest Woman to Hate on the Internet.

Her crime? Literally nothing beyond having her picture taken at a happy moment in her life.

She was one of the researchers who worked on developing the algorithms used to capture the first ever image of a black hole, and a photo of her reacting with delight to her team’s success circulated alongside the actual image of the black hole earlier this week. The photo of her inspired a brief burst of coverage about her role in the project, with some in the media crediting her as the person who’d written the code that enabled her team to generate the black hole image.

And that’s when the misogynists lost their shit, on Reddit and elsewhere, blaming her for stealing credit from the men on her team.

Countless other threads popped up in vast array of other subreddits, ranging from r/space to r/dankmemes, many of them contrasting her supposedly paltry work on the project with that of the man who allegedly “contributed 850,000 out of 900,000 lines of code” used to generate the image of the black hole.

Never mind that she never tried to take credit for anyone else’s work and in a Facebook post noted that “no one algorithm or person made this image, it required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work.”

Never mind that Andrew Chael, the guy the misogynists credited with doing the lion’s share of the work, quickly went on Twitter to denounce their attacks on Bouman and note that the algorithm they ultimately used “would have never worked without her contributions.” (He added that no, he had not in fact written nearly a million lines of code.)

Yet the misogynists just can’t stop talking shit about her, a woman who literally did nothing to them or the world other than doing her job well.

On Reddit’s worst hives of misogyny the reaction has been extreme, even by Reddit’s-worst-hives-of-misogyny standards.

After Chael stood up to defend her, Reddit’s incels were quick to denounce him as a “cuck” and a “numale” buttering her up in a desperate attempt to get laid. (In fact, as he pointed out in the very Twitter thread defending her, he’s gay.)

Normally for a post like this I would go through at least some of these threads in detail and extract some of the most revealing comments. But today, I just don’t have the patience. It’s Friday. Fuck it. I’ve browsed through a bunch of the threads and, well, it’s more or less the same old bullshit you’d expect from these reactionary assholes, only a lot more of it this time. Let them yell into the void this time. I’m fucking done right now.

And people wonder why women are reluctant to go into STEM fields.

EDITED TO ADD: There are so many topics on l’affaire Bouman in the Braincels and MGTOW subreddits alone that, well, here’s one browser window’s worth of the tabs I opened up for this piece, minus a bunch I’ve already closed. I have a bunch more tabs related to this post opened up in several other windows as well.

FWIW. I have nine separate windows open in Chrome right now and most of them have nearly this many tabs open in them. Even with most of the tabs suspended by a browser extension, I’m using 86% of my memory and went over 90% several times doing this post. I have a little bit of a tab problem.

We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!

Comments

This reminds me of the crap someone I follow on YouTube, the Chinese maker Naomi “SexyCyborg” Wu, gets because she is a woman, though with added helpings of orientalism and slut-shaming thrown in for good measure in Wu’s case because she has breast implants– something she is upfront about and was the topic of one of her most recent videos:

I first heard about her through the XBox hacker Bunny Huang’s blog who called out the abuse Wu was getting for her appearance. She was very shabbily treated by VICE magazine (there’s a surprise 🙄) last year who interviewed her and ignored requests from her to stay out of aspects of her private life that might get her into trouble with the PRC authorities… which were ignored because white people, I guess 🙄🙄

she didn’t contribute much its already been said by her colleagues you can find it pretty easily

At least She’s getting noticed for doing something actually related to the project . NASA mohawk guy Bobak Ferdowsi wasn’t the only member of the Curiosity Mars rover team but became a celebrity just for having cool hair.

Basically the hard parts she was involved in were:
– how do you use a telescope that isn’t well calibrated
– how do you verify your image isn’t just wishful thinking
– how do you automate some parameter choices

And I’m sure getting a dozen institutions to work together isn’t a walk in the park either.

Reading Bouman’s papers, i see why CalTech offered her a position. It’s really cool stuff, for years in a row, in various fields only vaguely related to each other.

There’s the black hole work. But there’s also taking video of fabric blowing in the wind and figuring what kind of material it is. And there’s taking video of a room and guessing what’s around the corner based on changes in light. And taking a single image of a 2D sprite in a game and guessing the animation it’s doing.

Nthing the fact that lines of code are not a sensible metric for % contribution.

My first professonal job was as a programmer. I made one program run about 20% faster by moving lines of code about, but I didn’t write new stuff.

[For geeks: it was interpretive BASIC. If you split a DO loop over lines 500 and 501 it goes:
Read line 500 and execute it
Read line 501 and execute it
Read lines 1-499
over and over (I think this was about 400 times)

If you put it all on one line it goes:
Read line 500 and execute it 400 times

So I did that with all the DO loops. Plus a few other bits.]

Then I got promoted to Software engineer, where I designed algorithms and flow charts and what should go into a subroutine. I wrote a lot less code and I was considered more valuable.

But then this freakout has nothing to do with how much people contributed, has it?

Remember, these are the same CHUDs that threw a fit when women pointed out that one of the Rosetta scientist’s shirt was kinda tacky and sexist. Now they want to give this scientist grief because of a single facial expression.

I realize that accusations of hypocrisy are meaningless these days, but I’ll still point it out for posterity.

Wow, they just…can’t be happy about anything, can they? The first ever picture of a black hole, and they fixate on the fact that a woman was on the team. If they claim to love science and innovation, I can’t find any evidence of it.

i think that a lot of them were triggered by a post (that now seems to be gone) by the popular Occupy Democrats that was giving her sole credit for the entire thing. Yeah, people took offense to that. And then some idiots took it even further, burying themselves in a pit of moron stew.

@Rv97
Hi, beware, although negative generalized claim about a nation can be not serious depending on context, maybe meaning their government and the people they represent, but taken alone they might contribute to dehumanization, with no more truth than “muslims are misogynists”, which would rightly not be well received 🙂 . I don’t meant to concern troll, with this.
Yes, pretty much, such people got riled up to be suspecting of women and minorities as result of liberal quotas and affirmative action, which is supposedly at fault for something that actually affect most people of not affluent classes, like economic hardship and difficulty in finding a job.
It’s perfect if a strong propaganda permeating medias and especially internet “screams” that they should direct the anger to other equally and often even more victimized people as obstacle, instead of an injust system that favours exploitation and stratification.
It’s no trivial job unpriming such toxic conditioning, which went viral and almost accepted, with even a “rebel” badge vibe. The subtext of course is that yeah, women can’t possibly excel like men, same for black people’s preposterous IQ score statistics and the liberal marxist cultural et al bingo elite*, has been an intricate plot to hide this inconvenient truth.
*Could be my next user name ? 😀

Notable is the use of powerful pseudofactuality and factoids in this case, although it’s a bit uncanny how they collectively get the same meme (but they accuse liberalSjwetc. of the same, of course) and reproduce it with such conviction, browsing reddit via the downvoted “Chuds” on ChapoTrapHouse, i walk in topics of that kinds where they repeat the same for Boumann, as they do for the 13% people 50% crime for black people.
They find something to be quantified to which reduce the work, lines of code, find out, she contributed to less than Andrew Chael in that regard, -> claim she received undue credit due to nazifem cultural marxist globalist media pushin women at the expense of men because Idpol and affirmative action gone made et al. Victimize a guy without even verify if that was the case, and if he doesn’t agree on being a victim of male bashing, he’s of course a beta orbiter, white knight cuck, very intellectual discourse!

As far as I can understand the whole development was a team effort to learn about this black hole. There were great males and females working together on this. Dr Bouer did her contribution, I am sure that others did too. The problem is that the feminist media used the black hole topic as an excuse to point out “we females were also contributing. Hello, do you see me? Hello, females are here, attention please!”. This is were a lot of people (like me) got ticked off. I am not discrediting Dr Bouer for her work, but let’s be real, she was not the only contributor here. The feminists have turned a great science discovery into a poor gender war display, as usual.

First, it is not Dr. Bouer, it is Dr. Katie Bouman – so your ability to follow the facts is already called into question.
Second, the media chose someone as a member of one of the teams that wrote the algorithm which put together the images into a coherent whole. No surprise that they chose someone who was designated leader, and no surprise that the leader pointed out that the whole team made it happen.
Third, sadly, also no surprise that some people lost their shit all over the internet because the person the media chose to focus on is female. Oh the horror. How dast they. Yawn, here we go again.
Fourth, why?! What is the big deal about picking the leader of an algorithm team to talk about? The media routinely holds up a human on stories of this type for general reporting, and sometimes one of the standout performers is a female (I’ve seen comments that Dr. Bouman was the PI – Primary Investigator – which would make failure to mention her especially stupid, but I cannot now find this information in the blizzard of stupid controversy about this – and I am not willing to wast the time on searching for this. Someone else might confirm or deny, but I’m moving on.)

Hi, Better safe than sorry, interesting, can I call you Bsts ?
Your curiousity might be in good faith as the talking points are driven home with such conviction and with a sort of invested aggressivity to insinuate the doubt, I also happened to balk, like “hey this might be a reasonable think to ask, but why all the mysoginy. Yeah mea culpa, liberals made so many mistake, I’m not even liberal, don’t associate me”, but of course that’s not rational, it’s a sort of defence response to that gaslighting narrative.
I noticed, though, you used the “bingo checkbox” “feminist media”, which means you validated some of their narrative apparently, but use it wisely ;). You might think, it’s up to us to prove you wrong, yeah, ok.
Ok, I want to assume you took all the precautions to not let the toxic part of this narrative convince you, and you were like “it’s feminist media and their communication which elicit this”, the first reaction is assume they have a point and grain of truth with 99% unnecessary hate built on top of it, because they act so damn aggressive sure in their posture, like they are using stone cold rationality. Do you know, on Braincel, I stumbled on the idea of being “logic raped”, like owned with logic, dominated and humiliated, that’s how a part of them, not called out on their language see the world, the same people who might deny rape culture. Of course there was hardly any logic on their post, just hate, it was a post stating “there are no girls on interned, you don’t get pussy pass, tits or gtfo”
Why do you assume it’s about a gender war to celebrate a stem woman, in a world where women disposition to math is called on question continuously and lots more posts on reddit about women inferiority, women being child and inherently so, awalt, than feminists doing nowhere near the same in feminist subs? Transphobic terfs, a minority fringe which actually hate men shares more with the manosphere in a Venn diagram, than most feminists.

The point however was, that this discovery was not so much on the amount of lines of code, which btw, echoes the leitmotif “learn to code” as solution to work and employment problems and such. Also correctly stated here, they realize a team effort is reduced to a person just if this person is a woman. She’s been very modest and gave due credit to the whole team.
Sorry for the length again

This is the full author list of the main paper for the black hole picture (with numbers for affiliation, sorry, not worth cleaning that up). It’s kind of long. The other five papers appear to have the same list of authors.

The norm is to list in order of contribution, and within a set of authors with equal contribution, you list in alphabetical order. Here, the authors are one giant set going from A to Z, then a second giant set going from A to Z. So you’d normally read Bouman as equal with Akiyama and Zhu, whereas Algaba to Ziurys would be less contributing.

I’m not particularly seeing evidence of Bouman leading the effort. She probably led some part of the effort.

The problem is that the feminist media used the black hole topic as an excuse to point out “we females were also contributing. Hello, do you see me? Hello, females are here, attention please!”. This is were a lot of people (like me) got ticked off.

BULLSHIT.

If you and others were really pissed off at “the feminist media” then the harassment would be directed at the journalists who wrote stories highlighting Dr. Bouman’s contributions.

Is that what happened? NOPE.

This is where a lot of people (like you?) slagged on Dr. Bouman. If her behavior was actually fine, AND IT WAS, then all the twitter rage about disproportionate shares of credit would be directed at specific articles, outlets or authors, BUT NOT HER.

And yet what do we see? A WHOLE SHITLOAD OF ATTACKS ON DR. BOUMAN.

Hmm. Your bullshit excuse for misogyny holds as much water as a solid steel sphere.

She speculated a bunch about why not Sgr A*, but everything I’ve seen is that it’s because Sgr A* rotates too fast. It’s critical that the earth have time to rotate in order to fill in the gaps. With more telescopes they don’t need the earth to rotate as much to get equally good data, so they get better temporal resolution, but they didn’t have many in 2017.

My goodness, so many remarks to my post. Ah well.
@MDavis: Bouer or Bouman, who cares, you know whom I was talking about.
@Laini. Why don’t you just leave it up to me to decide what to do? Bye!
@Numerosis. Interesting article indeed!

I remain of the opinion that it was more of a team effort than one single person who has done the brunt of the work. I am absolutely certain that if it was a male who has done most of the work, for sure it would not have gained the same attention. But since SHE has written the algorithm, gender was put into focus here. If you fail to recognize that, fine. I am sticking with my opinion and I am glad I am not alone in that. Thank you.

“we females were also contributing. Hello, do you see me? Hello, females are here, attention please!”.

This is definitely an accurate representation of how we feeemales talk.

Why do reactionaries never understand how parody (or satire or any other kind of humor) works? If you’re going to do an exaggerated version of how feminists talk, you need to understand how we talk, imitate it, and add hyperbole. What you did was just talk like a misogynistic man talking about women.

Because their dumb. That’s the basic of it. They interact with women so little, that they only have a made up version of what a woman is. So then they try to make an exaggeration from their already fantasy version of a woman. Then they end up sounding like one of Lewis Binford’s papers, which by the way is gonna make me drink myself into an early grave.

Hmm, now you’ve reminded me of something. There was that gas cloud/(broken up star?) orbiting our black hole, that was predicted could be accreted any time soon. Do you know if anything came of that?

Also, speaking of spinning
fast and astronomy; it’s not uncommon for people to ask why Hubble isn’t used for earth observation. There’s a bunch of reasons; but primarily it’s because the earth rotates too quickly, relatively speaking. To the extent that they use the blur to calibrate the white balance.

But I found out, just this year, that the KH-11 keyhole spy satellites are just Hubble telescopes, but pointing down.

So the better question, I think, is why not the use those to look outwards. There’s plenty of opportunity for that when there’s no operational necessity for surveillance; and imagine the resolution possibilities if you synched a few of them up!

I believe you are making a fatal assumption that the vast majority of the trolls aren’t bots. Predominately Russian bots. They are effective at riling up a country’s emotions against each other, not just the US. When a country’s peoples’ opinions are ‘balkanized’, they are distracted and unable to coalesce into a functional power. Emotionalized people (who are coming from their lizard brain) are the easiest to manipulate. Our online world is becoming ever more bot polluted, but we are not realizing it. They are not being stopped by the media corps nor the government. The bigger picture in our face is the healthy demand to evolve our functioning heart wisdom over our emotional stress brain reactions. Beware our reactions. Beware balkanization manipulations. Do we rank and demonize, or do we get effective at sharing our core values and know how to move to harmonize with each other?

Cornychips pointed out on another thread that BSTS is a sock for a troll who was banned a few months ago. He got his ass kicked from Lake Bikal all the way to Vladivostok and apparently thinks things will go differently this time.

I’ve forgotten his name, but he had an inflatable wife and kept nattering on about how he’d only leave if MR FUTRELLE told him to – which David did.

Do we rank and demonize, or do we get effective at sharing our core values and know how to move to harmonize with each other?

Some trolls are indeed professional trolls from Russia or a bot. Some aren’t. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push back against what they say. They’re effective because they’re saying what a lot of people are really thinking. I can’t know right away whether a specific troll is a bot or a misogynist for hire or whatever, but what I do know is that “ignore the trolls” has been spectacularly ineffective in combating them. Until social media platforms make a real effort to ban trolls (and for that matter, actual Nazis), the only thing we can do is show why they’re wrong.

Donate to the Mammoth!

We Hunted the Mammoth is an ad-free, reader-supported publication written and published by longtime journalist David Futrelle, who has been tracking, dissecting, and mocking the growing misogynistic backlash since 2010, exposing the hateful ideologies of Men’s Rights Activists, incels, alt-rightists and many others.

We depend on support from people like you. Please consider a donation or a monthly pledge by clicking below! there's no need for a PayPal account.

Send comments, questions, and tips for stories to me at dfutrelle@gmail.com, or by clicking here